This book will be an eye-opener for archaeology. It presents a global but contextualized analysis and interpretation of evidence for the role played by captives in small-scale (i.e. ‘nonstate’) societies. And this role was not a minor one: from ten to thirty percent of the population in such societies were made up of captives, most of them women and children. Cameron draws from ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and historical sources to provide a contextualized, yet comparative anthropological framework for understanding the widespread phenomenon of taking captives in small-scale societies around the world. Captives presents both single cases of individual fates, as well as data from a global survey spanning from complex hunter-gatherers through tribal societies to chiefdoms. It summarizes ten years of research into the topic, and is preceded by a series of influential publications (Cameron, Reference Cameron2008; Reference Cameron2011).

Chapter 1, ‘Captives in Space, Time, and Mind’, provides a historical discussion of warfare and its relation to captive taking in small-scale societies, and the prevalence of captive taking and slavery across the world until very recently, also in state level societies (e.g. slaves made up to twenty-five per cent of England's population, as reported in the Domesday Book census in ad 1086). The chapter also defines the different relevant categories, from war-captives to slaves and slave raiding for commercial markets, which mostly represents a different category that is part of a more recent phenomenon.

‘Captive Taking in Global Perspective’ (Ch. 2), provides a global overview of the mechanisms of captive taking, covering in more detail the North American regions, but also tackling, even if superficially, South America, Africa, Europe, and the islands of Southeast Asia. In small-scale societies, captives were primarily taken to provide labor, and they were mostly women and sometimes children, while males were killed when possible in order to prevent revenge. Raids for captive taking were also normally carried out outside one's own ethnic group.

Chapter 3, discusses ‘The Captive as a Social Person’, that is, how the social identity of the captive is constructed as they enter the captor's society. It has great relevance to archaeology, as captives often brought new skills to the society they entered. However, they were subordinate, and mostly owned by wealthy, chiefly lineages, but they could change their status and identity through life, as could then their children. A fascinating story about a captive, Helena Valero, Napagnuma (‘white woman’ or ‘foreign woman’) of the Yanomamö is then told. Her fate illustrates the often experienced phenomenon that to become abducted is stigmatizing and prevents social acceptance in your original community if you succeed to return. After twenty years of capture among various groups where she had been the wife of several powerful chiefs, and had two children, she succeeded to escape back to her own ‘white’ community. Only to realize that she and her children were not accepted, and she ended living among other Indians near a mission to survive.

Chapter 4, ‘Captives and the Creation of Power’, describes how captives and the raids conducted to take them, as well as their labor, helped to accelerate processes of power acquisition and competition among chiefly lineages and their warrior groups. Captives also represented wealth, and were as such status symbols in addition to providing labor (which also created wealth, without reciprocal demands), and they could be transferred or sold in internal transactions as well.

In ‘Captives, Social Boundaries, and Ethnogenesis’ (Ch. 5), Cameron discusses the roles of captives in the shaping of social boundaries and ethnogenesis. Most raids were carried out outside one's own ethnic group, and, thus, raids for captive-taking supported internal ethnic solidarity and allowed the demonization of the raided groups, justifying both killings and the subordinate role of captives. However, captives would also bring knowledge from these ‘others’ into the captors’ society, thus promoting cultural transmission and change. This chapter has direct relevance for archaeological discussions of different forms of material/cultural identities and their role in prehistory. Chapter 6 explores the role of captives in cultural transmission. It starts with a discussion of the various mechanisms usually employed to account for cultural transmission, from skills to institutions, and then proceeds to demonstrate the important role of captives in such processes when it comes to craft production, food, and religious innovations (also discussing case studies from state-level societies). Their skills (e.g. competence in more than one language) would also make them important intermediaries in negotiations with other tribes. Thus, we have here a perhaps overlooked mechanism of cultural transmission, in addition to the more prestige-good-related transmissions as described by Mary W. Helms (Reference Helms1988).

The final chapter, ‘Captives in Prehistory’ (Ch. 7), discusses the implications of the results of Cameron's cross-cultural study for prehistory, and importantly how to possibly identify captives in the archaeological record. Captives tend to be invisible, but can possibly be identified through their role as agents of cultural change, in combination with more concrete evidence, such as diet differences and how they relate to strontium isotopes of origin (Sjögren, Price & Kristiansen, Reference Sjögren, Price and Kristiansen2016), osteological signatures of physical conditions through life, and finally through the use of more informal or deviating burial customs. However, perhaps even as intriguing, the book provides a framework for understanding the role of low-level recurring warfare and raiding in small-scale societies around the world. This chapter has clear implications also for prehistoric societies, since it is notoriously difficult to trace archaeologically, although the arrival of stable isotope and aDNA analysis has helped us to define non-locals and untangle ancestry. A considerable number of mass-burials or just informal burials have emerged during the last thirty years due to large scale rescue archaeology projects that uncover areas outside normal cemeteries and also in settlements. Thus, given the usual low visibility of such phenomena we can assume that such killings and their informal burials were rather common and, perhaps also the taking of captives. The evidence shows two basic patterns: one of massive killing of a whole community to take over their land, and another of selective killing of males, with the abduction of women and children (Spatzier, Reference Spatzier, Mattic and Jensen2017). Not least the latter form may have been dominant, but we need more research that combines archaeological, osteological analyses of trauma, and science-based evidence from aDNA and strontium isotopes to unwind these complex relationships (Schulting & Fibiger Reference Schulting and Fibiger2014; Schroeder et al., Reference Schroeder, Margaryan, Szmyt, Theulot, Włodarczak and Rasmussen2019).